Snapshot Summary, February 20-24 2012. week 18

Snapshot Summary, February 20-24

Our colds are still holding on strong, however we did have some moments of learning between the coughs, sniffles and fever...

Monday
20

President's Day

We made Presidential Pockets which they filled with drawings of objects that represent the president of their choice, and ate chocolate log. It was supposed to represent Lincoln's logs but Steven suggested that it could represent Washington's Cherry Tree as well.

Tuesday

21

Mardi Gras

We learned that a celebration does not have to be expensive or time consuming to prepare.
We had very simple fun on Mardi Gras.

Throughout the week...
Geography: Salt Dough Map of USA

Inspired by Hodgepodge's salt dough map, we made one of America, and it should prove useful as we move into our unit on Lewis and Clark. We will paint it next week.

Science: Whales

We finally finished our whale studies by measuring the lengths of several whales on the sidewalk outside our house.

Math: Fractions

Continuing with the work with fractions we did last week, this week we used sticks of Unifix cubes to generate a greater variety of equivalent fractions than was possible with paper folding.

 First we began with a stick of eight cubes and I guided him through finding equivalent fractions by asking questions such as,

What fraction of the whole stick is one cube?

Can you break your stick into four equal parts? If the stick you started with was one whole stick, what fraction of it would one of your parts be?

I continue asking him to break the whole stick into various divisions and asking him what equivalent fractions they are. I record them for him on a sheet of paper as he answers the questions or makes discoveries himself.

Once he seemed confident in finding equivalent fractions in this way, I let him decide what stick length he wanted to work with.

To assist him, I continued being his scribe for awhile. I divided a couple of sheets of paper into sections, labeled the top of each section with a number. This number was the length of the cube stick. I just recorded what he told me about his discoveries. We worked on this for as little or as long as he wanted to for a few days. When we continued it on another day I felt he was ready to record his own discoveries and finish his chart of equivalent fractions.

On another day we played another game called, "Start With-Go By." To play, you begin by picking a number, say in this case, the number 3 and asking him to go by 3, generating a list of numbers which are three apart from each other. You then ask your student to start with another number, say 8 and go by 8 and he can generate another list of numbers. There was no specific length to this list, we just went until we felt we had generated a good list of numbers. Then  I asked him to tell the numbers that were in both columns and we underlined those.

I then gave him a fraction problem with those numbers in it, in this case, 1/3 + 1/8 =.  I told him that with the lists he generated, he could solve the problem.

 I asked him to take the first number given on the both list, which in this case was 24, and make two cube sticks of that length. Now break the first cube stick into sticks of 3 in length so that we could change the 1/5 into an equivalent fraction. He made eight sticks. We wrote down the equivalent fraction as 8/24 or eight sticks of three out of a 24 stick cube. The second stick was broken into sticks eight cubes long. We could then write the equivalent fraction for 1/8 as 3/24 or 3 cube sticks 8 cubes long out of a 24 cube stick.

Now solving the problem was easy. We added one cube stick from each group and together and got the answer of 11/24.

He happily did several problems like this.
More about fractions next week as we learn to multiply them.